Students on more than 20 campuses across the country are preparing to take part in a national day of action against the government’s plans to privatise the student loan book. The wave of action will take place tomorrow and is being co-ordinated by the Student Assembly Against Austerity, which held its launch rally earlier this month.

The government’s announcement in late June of this year that
they intend to sell
off student debt to private companies before the next general election has
caused widespread concern that this will lead to an increase in the
financial burdens placed on students and graduates.

This concern is well placed. As a secret
report for the government has revealed, in order to make sure the student
loan book is profitable for private companies the cap on interest for
repayments would need to be increased or removed all together. To put it
bluntly, this proposal would cause student debt to soar and represents a
retrospective hike in tuition fees, in violation of the agreements students
entered into on getting the loans.

James Elliott, a student activist from Oxford University, who
is taking part in the national day of action next week, has explained why he is
determined to build a movement to stop student loans being privatised: "imagine
a policy that would retrospectively increase tuition fees, move a huge sum of
public debt into private hands, cost the government money in the long-run, and
plunge students into even higher debt."

In response to this threat, students are beginning the task
of building a mass movement on every campus. Next Wednesday’s national day of
action will see hundreds of students attend open air rallies at universities in
Liverpool and Oxford whilst at MidKent College students will be taking on “an
obstacle course of student debt” in a symbolic protest that will highlight the
financial barriers in the way of young people in further education accessing
higher education. Students in Norwich, Manchester and York will be demanding
their local MPs join the growing opposition in Parliament to the student debt
sell-off, whilst a wave of banner drops, ‘debt ins’ and other creative protest
and direct action will sweep across many other campuses.

The national day of action on Wednesday 20 November will
mark the start of a serious, national mass movement to stop the Tory-Liberal
government from succeeding in their plan to privatise student loans. As awareness
amongst students grows that this proposal represents just as much an attack as
the trebling of tuition fees in 2010, the Government should prepare for a
massive wave of opposition if they try to push this through.